2005

We introduce two new functionals, the constrained covariance and the kernel mutual information, to measure the degree of independence of random variables. These quantities are both based on the covariance between functions of the random variables in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs). We prove that when the RKHSs are universal, both functionals are zero if and only if the random variables are pairwise independent.
We also show that the kernel mutual information is an upper bound near independence on the Parzen window estimate of the mutual information.
Analogous results apply for two correlation-based dependence functionals introduced earlier: we show the kernel canonical correlation and the kernel generalised variance to be independence measures for universal
kernels, and prove the latter to be an upper bound on the mutual information near independence. The performance of the kernel dependence functionals in measuring independence is verified in the context of independent component analysis.

We provide a new unifying view, including all existing proper probabilistic
sparse approximations for Gaussian process regression. Our approach relies on
expressing the effective prior which the methods are using. This
allows new insights to be gained, and highlights the relationship between
existing methods. It also allows for a clear theoretically justified ranking
of the closeness of the known approximations to the corresponding full GPs.
Finally we point directly to designs of new better sparse approximations,
combining the best of the existing strategies, within attractive
computational constraints.

In this paper we present a primal-dual decomposition algorithm for
support vector machine training. As with existing methods that use
very small working sets (such as Sequential Minimal
Optimization (SMO), Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) or
the Kernel Adatron (KA)), our method scales well, is
straightforward to implement, and does not require an external QP
solver. Unlike SMO, SOR and KA, the method is applicable to a
large number of SVM formulations regardless of the number of
equality constraints involved. The effectiveness of our algorithm
is demonstrated on a more difficult SVM variant in this respect,
namely semi-parametric support vector regression.

We propose an independence criterion based on the eigenspectrum of covariance operators in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs), consisting of an empirical estimate of the Hilbert-Schmidt norm of the cross-covariance operator (we term this a Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion, or HSIC). This approach has several advantages, compared with previous kernel-based independence criteria. First, the empirical estimate is simpler than any other kernel dependence test, and requires no user-defined regularisation. Second, there is a clearly defined population quantity which the empirical estimate approaches in the large sample limit, with exponential convergence guaranteed between the two: this ensures that independence tests based on {methodname} do not suffer from slow learning rates.
Finally, we show in the context of independent component analysis (ICA) that the performance of HSIC is competitive with that of previously published kernel-based criteria, and of other recently published ICA methods.

Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 71(3):333-359, October 2005 (article)

Abstract

In order to apply the maximum margin method in arbitrary metric
spaces, we suggest to embed the metric space into a Banach or
Hilbert space and to perform linear classification in this space.
We propose several embeddings and recall that an isometric embedding
in a Banach space is always possible while an isometric embedding in
a Hilbert space is only possible for certain metric spaces. As a
result, we obtain a general maximum margin classification
algorithm for arbitrary metric spaces (whose solution is
approximated by an algorithm of Graepel.
Interestingly enough, the embedding approach, when applied to a metric
which can be embedded into a Hilbert space, yields the SVM
algorithm, which emphasizes the fact that its solution depends on
the metric and not on the kernel. Furthermore we give upper bounds
of the capacity of the function classes corresponding to both
embeddings in terms of Rademacher averages. Finally we compare the
capacities of these function classes directly.

This paper deals with an unusual phenomenon where most machine learning algorithms yield good performance on the training set but systematically worse than random performance on the test set. This has been observed so far for some natural data sets and demonstrated for some synthetic data sets when the classification rule is learned from a small set of training samples drawn from some high dimensional space. The initial analysis presented in this paper shows that anti-learning is a property of data sets and is quite distinct from overfitting of a training data. Moreover, the analysis leads to a specification of some machine learning procedures which can overcome anti-learning and generate ma- chines able to classify training and test data consistently.

Gaussian process priors can be used to define flexible, probabilistic classification models. Unfortunately exact Bayesian inference is analytically intractable and various approximation techniques have been proposed. In this work we review and compare Laplace‘s method and Expectation Propagation for approximate Bayesian inference in the binary Gaussian process classification model. We present a comprehensive comparison of the approximations, their predictive performance and marginal likelihood estimates to results obtained by MCMC sampling. We explain theoretically and corroborate empirically the advantages of Expectation Propagation compared to Laplace‘s method.

Several large scale data mining applications, such as text categorization and gene expression analysis, involve high-dimensional data that is also inherently directional in nature. Often such data is L2 normalized so that it lies on the surface of a unit hypersphere. Popular models such as (mixtures of) multi-variate Gaussians are inadequate for characterizing such data. This paper proposes a generative mixture-model approach to clustering directional data based on the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution, which arises naturally for data distributed on the unit hypersphere. In particular, we derive and analyze two variants of the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework for estimating the mean and concentration parameters of this mixture. Numerical estimation of the concentration parameters is non-trivial in high dimensions since it involves functional inversion of ratios of Bessel functions. We also formulate two clustering algorithms corresponding to the variants of EM that we derive. Our approach provides a
theoretical basis for the use of cosine similarity that has been widely employed by the information retrieval community, and obtains the spherical kmeans algorithm (kmeans with cosine similarity) as a special case of both variants. Empirical results on clustering of high-dimensional text and gene-expression data based on a mixture of vMF distributions show that the ability to estimate the concentration parameter for each vMF component, which is not present in existing approaches, yields superior results, especially for difficult clustering tasks in high-dimensional spaces.

We propose statistical learning methods for approximating implicit surfaces and computing dense 3D deformation fields. Our approach is based on Support Vector (SV) Machines, which are state of the art in machine learning. It is straightforward to implement and computationally competitive; its parameters can be automatically set using standard machine learning methods.
The surface approximation is based on a modified Support Vector regression. We present applications to 3D head reconstruction, including automatic removal of outliers and hole filling.
In a second step, we build on our SV representation to compute dense 3D deformation fields between two objects.
The fields are computed using a generalized SVMachine enforcing correspondence between the previously learned implicit SV object representations, as well as correspondences between feature points if such points are available.
We apply the method to the morphing of 3D heads and other objects.

Support vector machines (SVM) have been successfully used to classify proteins into functional categories.
Recently, to integrate multiple data sources, a semidefinite programming (SDP) based SVM method was introduced Lanckriet et al (2004). In SDP/SVM, multiple kernel matrices corresponding to each of data sources are combined with
weights obtained by solving an SDP. However, when trying to apply SDP/SVM to large problems, the computational cost can become prohibitive, since both converting the data to a kernel matrix for the SVM and solving the SDP are time and memory demanding. Another application-specific drawback arises when some of the data sources are protein networks. A common method of converting the network to a kernel matrix is the diffusion kernel method, which has
time complexity of O(n^3), and produces a dense matrix of size n x n. We propose an efficient method of protein classification using multiple protein networks. Available protein networks, such as a physical interaction network or a
metabolic network, can be directly incorporated. Vectorial data can also be incorporated after conversion into a network by means of neighbor point connection. Similarly to the SDP/SVM method, the combination weights are obtained by convex optimization. Due to the sparsity of network edges, the computation time is nearly linear in the number of edges
of the combined network. Additionally, the combination weights provide information useful for discarding noisy or irrelevant networks. Experiments on function prediction of 3588 yeast proteins show promising results: the computation time is enormously reduced, while the accuracy is still comparable to the SDP/SVM method.

In recent years, Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA) has been suggested for various image processing tasks requiring an image model such as, e.g., denoising or compression. The original form of KPCA, however, can be only applied to strongly restricted image classes due to the limited number of training examples that can be processed. We therefore propose a new iterative method for performing KPCA, the Kernel Hebbian Algorithm which iteratively estimates the Kernel Principal Components with only linear order memory complexity. In our experiments, we compute models for complex image classes such as faces and natural images which require a large number of training examples. The resulting image models are tested in single-frame super-resolution and denoising applications. The KPCA model is not specifically tailored to these tasks; in fact, the same model can be used in super-resolution with variable input resolution, or denoising with unknown noise characteristics. In spite of this, both super-resolution a
nd denoising performance are comparable to existing methods.

Gene expression profiling of three chondrosarcoma derived cell lines (AD, SM, 105KC) showed an increased proliferative activity and a reduced expression of chondrocytic-typical matrix products compared to primary chondrocytes. The incapability to maintain an adequate matrix synthesis as well as a notable proliferative activity at the same time is comparable to neoplastic chondrosarcoma cells in vivo which cease largely cartilage matrix formation as soon as their proliferative activity increases. Thus, the investigated cell lines are of limited value as substitute of primary chondrocytes but might have a much higher potential to investigate the behavior of neoplastic chondrocytes, i.e. chondrosarcoma biology.

We propose new bounds on the error of learning algorithms in terms of a data-dependent notion of complexity. The estimates we establish give optimal rates and are based on a local and empirical version of Rademacher averages, in the sense that the Rademacher averages are computed from the data, on a subset of functions with small empirical error. We present some applications to classification and prediction with convex function classes, and with kernel classes in particular.

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 996-1003, (Editors: L De Raedt and S Wrobel ), ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICML , August 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to build Sparse Large Margin Classifiers (SLMC) by adding one more constraint to the standard Support Vector Machine (SVM) training problem. The added constraint explicitly controls the sparseness of the classifier and an approach is provided to solve the formulated problem. When considering the dual of this problem, it can be seen that building an SLMC is equivalent to constructing an SVM with a modified kernel function. Further analysis of this kernel function indicates that the proposed approach essentially finds a discriminating subspace that can be spanned by a small number of vectors, and in this subspace different classes of data are linearly well separated. Experimental results over several classification benchmarks show that in most cases the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-art sparse learning algorithms.

In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pages: 1041 -1048, (Editors: L De Raedt and S Wrobel), ACM, New York, NY, USA, ICML, August 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We propose a general framework for learning from labeled and
unlabeled data on a directed graph in which the structure of the graph including the directionality of the edges is considered. The time complexity of the algorithm derived from this framework is nearly linear due to recently developed numerical techniques. In the absence of labeled instances, this framework can be utilized as a spectral clustering method for directed graphs, which generalizes the spectral clustering approach for undirected graphs. We have applied our framework to real-world web classification problems and obtained encouraging results.

We consider the classification problem on a finite set of objects. Some of them are labeled, and the task is to predict the labels of the remaining unlabeled ones. Such an estimation problem is generally referred to as transductive inference. It is well-known that many meaningful inductive or supervised methods can be
derived from a regularization framework, which minimizes a loss function plus a regularization term. In the same spirit, we propose a general discrete regularization framework defined on finite object sets, which can be thought of as the discrete analogue of classical regularization theory. A family of transductive inference schemes is then systemically derived from the framework, including our earlier algorithm for transductive
inference, with which we obtained encouraging results on many practical classification problems. The discrete regularization framework is built on the discrete analysis and geometry developed by ourselves, in which a number of discrete differential operators of various orders are constructed, which can be thought of as the discrete analogue of their counterparts in the continuous case.

It is common in classification methods to first place data in a vector
space and then learn decision boundaries. We propose reversing that
process: for fixed decision boundaries, we ``learn&amp;amp;lsquo;&amp;amp;lsquo; the location of the
data. This way we (i) do not need a metric (or even stronger structure)
-- pairwise dissimilarities suffice; and additionally (ii) produce
low-dimensional embeddings that can be analyzed visually.
We achieve this by combining an entropy-based embedding method
with an entropy-based version of semi-supervised logistic regression.
We present results for clustering and semi-supervised classification.

This paper proposes a method for computing fast approximations to support vector decision functions in the field of object detection. In the present approach we are building on an existing algorithm where the set of support vectors is replaced by a smaller, so-called reduced set of synthesized input space points. In contrast to the existing method that finds the reduced set via unconstrained optimization, we impose a structural constraint on the synthetic points such that the resulting approximations can be evaluated via separable filters. For applications that require scanning an entire image, this decreases the computational complexity of a scan by a significant amount. We present experimental results on a standard face detection database.

During the last ten years there has been growing interest in the development of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs).
The field has mainly been driven by the needs of completely paralyzed patients to communicate. With a few exceptions, most human BCIs are based on extracranial electroencephalography (EEG). However, reported bit rates are still low. One reason for this is the low signal-to-noise ratio of the EEG. We are currently investigating if BCIs based on electrocorticography (ECoG) are a viable alternative. In this paper we present the method and examples of intracranial EEG recordings of three epilepsy patients with electrode grids placed on the motor cortex. The patients were asked to repeatedly imagine movements of two kinds, e.g., tongue or finger movements. We analyze the classifiability of the data using Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Recursive Channel Elimination (RCE).

Choice-based conjoint analysis builds models of consumers preferences over products with answers gathered in questionnaires. Our main goal is to bring tools from the machine learning community to solve more efficiently this problem. Thus, we propose two algorithms to estimate quickly and accurately consumer preferences.

Motivated by the particular problems involved in communicating with "locked-in" paralysed patients, we aim to develop a brain-computer interface that uses auditory stimuli. We describe a paradigm that allows a user to make a binary decision by focusing attention on one of two concurrent auditory stimulus sequences. Using Support Vector Machine classification and Recursive Channel Elimination on the independent components of averaged event-related potentials, we show that an untrained user's EEG data can be classified with an encouragingly high level of accuracy. This suggests that it is possible for users to modulate EEG signals in a single trial by the conscious direction of attention, well enough to be useful in BCI.

We address the problem of learning a symmetric positive definite matrix. The central issue is to design parameter updates that preserve positive definiteness. Our updates are motivated with the von Neumann divergence. Rather than treating the most general case, we focus on two key
applications that exemplify our methods: On-line learning with a simple square loss and finding a symmetric positive definite matrix subject to symmetric linear constraints. The updates generalize the Exponentiated Gradient (EG) update and AdaBoost, respectively: the parameter is now
a symmetric positive definite matrix of trace one instead of a probability vector (which in this context is a diagonal positive definite matrix with trace one). The generalized updates use matrix logarithms and exponentials
to preserve positive definiteness. Most importantly, we show how the analysis of each algorithm generalizes to the non-diagonal case. We apply both new algorithms, called the Matrix Exponentiated Gradient (MEG) update and DefiniteBoost, to learn a kernel matrix from distance
measurements.

We study gender discrimination of human faces using a combination of psychophysical classification and discrimination experiments together with methods from machine learning. We reduce the dimensionality of a set of face images using principal component analysis, and then train a set of linear classifiers on this reduced representation (linear support vector machines (SVMs), relevance vector machines (RVMs), Fisher linear discriminant (FLD), and prototype (prot) classifiers) using human classification data. Because we combine a linear preprocessor with linear classifiers, the entire system acts as a linear classifier, allowing us to visualise the decision-image corresponding to the normal vector of the separating hyperplanes (SH) of each classifier. We predict that the female-to-maleness transition along the normal vector for classifiers closely mimicking human classification (SVM and RVM 1) should be faster than the transition along any other direction. A psychophysical discrimination experiment using the decision images as stimuli is consistent with this prediction.

This paper addresses the problem of choosing a kernel suitable for
estimation with a Support Vector
Machine, hence further automating machine learning.
This goal is achieved by defining a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert
Space on the space of kernels itself. Such a formulation leads to a
statistical estimation problem similar to the problem of minimizing
a regularized risk functional.
We state the equivalent
representer theorem for the choice of kernels and present a
semidefinite programming formulation of the resulting optimization
problem. Several recipes for constructing hyperkernels are provided, as
well as the details of common machine learning problems. Experimental
results for classification, regression and novelty
detection on UCI data show the feasibility of our approach.

We propose an algorithm for selectively removing examples from the training set using probabilistic estimates related to editing algorithms (Devijver and Kittler82). The procedure creates a separable distribution of training examples with minimal impact on the decision boundary position. It breaks the linear dependency between the number of SVs and the number of training examples, and sharply reduces the complexity of SVMs during both the training and prediction stages.

The computation of classical higher-order statistics such as
higher-order moments or spectra is difficult for images due to the huge number of terms to be estimated and interpreted. We propose an alternative approach in which multiplicative pixel interactions are described by a series of Wiener functionals. Since the functionals are estimated implicitly via polynomial kernels, the combinatorial
explosion associated with the classical higher-order statistics is avoided. First results show that image structures such as lines or corners can be predicted correctly, and that pixel interactions up to the order of five play an important role in natural images.

An important aspect of clustering algorithms is whether the partitions constructed on finite samples converge to a useful clustering of the whole data space as the sample size increases. This paper investigates this question for normalized and unnormalized versions of the popular spectral
clustering algorithm. Surprisingly, the convergence of unnormalized spectral clustering is more difficult to handle than the normalized case. Even though recently some first results on the convergence of normalized spectral clustering have been obtained, for the unnormalized case
we have to develop a completely new approach combining tools from numerical integration, spectral and perturbation theory, and probability. It turns out that while in the normalized case, spectral clustering usually converges to a nice partition of the data space, in the unnormalized case
the same only holds under strong additional assumptions which are not always satisfied. We conclude that our analysis gives strong evidence for the superiority of normalized spectral clustering. It also provides a basis
for future exploration of other Laplacian-based methods.

Given a directed graph in which some of the nodes are labeled, we investigate the question of how to exploit the link structure of the graph to infer the labels of the remaining unlabeled nodes. To that extent we propose a regularization framework for functions defined over nodes of a directed graph that forces the classification function to change slowly on densely linked subgraphs. A powerful, yet computationally simple classification algorithm is derived within the proposed framework. The experimental evaluation on real-world Web classification problems demonstrates encouraging results that validate our approach.

Non parametric regressions methods can be presented in two main clusters. The one of smoothing splines methods requiring positive kernels and the other one known as Nonparametric Kernel Regression allowing the use of non positive kernels such as the Epanechnikov kernel.
We propose a generalization of the smoothing spline method to include kernels which are still symmetric but not positive
semi definite (they are called indefinite). The general relationship between smoothing spline, Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces and positive kernels no longer exists with indefinite kernel. Instead they are associated with functional spaces called Reproducing Kernel Krein Spaces (RKKS) embedded with an indefinite inner product and thus not directly associated with a norm. Smothing splines in RKKS have many of the interesting properties of splines in RKHS, such as orthogon
ality, projection, representer theorem and generalization bounds.
We show that smoothing splines can be defined in RKKS as the regularized solution of the interpolation problem. Since no
norm is available in a RKKS, Tikhonov regularization cannot be defined. Instead, we proposed to use iterative methods of conjugate gradient type with early stopping as regularization mechanism. Several iterative algorithms were collected
which can be used to solve the optimization problems associated with learning in indefinite spaces. Some preliminary experiments with indefinite kernels for spline smoothing are reported revealing the computational efficiency of the approach.

We describe methods for computing an implicit model of a hypersurface that is given only by a finite sampling. The methods work by mapping the sample points into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space and then determining regions in terms of hyperplanes.

One way of image denoising is to project a noisy image to the subspace of admissible images derived, for instance, by PCA. However, a major drawback of this method is that all pixels are updated by the projection, even when only a few pixels are corrupted by noise or occlusion. We propose a new method to identify the noisy pixels by l1-norm penalization and to update the identified pixels only. The identification and updating of noisy pixels are formulated as one linear program which can be efficiently solved. In particular, one can apply the upsilon trick to directly specify the fraction of pixels to be reconstructed. Moreover, we extend the linear program to be able to exploit prior knowledge that occlusions often appear in contiguous blocks (e.g., sunglasses on faces). The basic idea is to penalize boundary points and interior points of the occluded area differently. We are also able to show the upsilon property for this extended LP leading to a method which is easy to use. Experimental results demonstrate the power of our approach.

We address the problem of learning a symmetric positive definite matrix. The central issue is to design
parameter updates that preserve positive definiteness. Our updates are motivated with the von
Neumann divergence. Rather than treating the most general case, we focus on two key applications
that exemplify our methods: on-line learning with a simple square loss, and finding a symmetric
positive definite matrix subject to linear constraints. The updates generalize the exponentiated gradient
(EG) update and AdaBoost, respectively: the parameter is now a symmetric positive definite
matrix of trace one instead of a probability vector (which in this context is a diagonal positive definite
matrix with trace one). The generalized updates use matrix logarithms and exponentials to
preserve positive definiteness. Most importantly, we show how the derivation and the analyses of
the original EG update and AdaBoost generalize to the non-diagonal case. We apply the resulting
matrix exponentiated gradient (MEG) update and DefiniteBoost to the problem of learning a kernel
matrix from distance measurements.

Journal of the Optical Society of America A, 22(5):801-809, May 2005 (article)

Abstract

A number of models of depth cue combination suggest that the final depth percept results from a weighted average of independent depth estimates based on the different cues available. The weight of each cue in such an average is thought to depend on the reliability of each cue. In principle, such a depth estimation could be statistically optimal in the sense of producing the minimum variance unbiased estimator that can be constructed from the available information. Here we test such models using visual and haptic depth information. Different texture types produce differences in slant discrimination performance, providing a means for testing a reliability-sensitive cue combination model using texture as one of the cues to slant. Our results show that the weights for the cues were generally sensitive to their reliability, but fell short of statistically optimal combinationwe find reliability-based re-weighting, but not statistically optimal cue combination.

In psychophysical studies, the psychometric function is used to model the relation between physical stimulus intensity and the observers ability to detect or discriminate between stimuli of different intensities. In this study, we propose the use of Bayesian inference to extract the information contained in experimental data to estimate the parameters of psychometric functions. Because Bayesian inference cannot be performed analytically, we describe how a Markov chain Monte Carlo method can be used to generate samples from the posterior distribution over parameters. These samples are used to estimate Bayesian confidence intervals and other characteristics of the posterior distribution. In addition, we discuss the parameterization of psychometric functions and the role of prior distributions in the analysis. The proposed approach is exemplified using artificially generated data and in a case study for real experimental data. Furthermore, we compare our approach with traditional methods based on maximum likelihood parameter estimation combined with bootstrap techniques for confidence interval estimation and find the Bayesian approach to be superior.

Regulatory regions of plant genes tend to be more compact than those of animal genes, but the complement of transcription factors encoded in plant genomes is as large or larger than that found in those of animals. Plants therefore provide an opportunity to study how transcriptional programs control multicellular development. We analyzed global gene expression during development of the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana in samples covering many stages, from embryogenesis to senescence, and diverse organs. Here, we provide a first analysis of this data set, which is part of the AtGenExpress expression atlas. We observed that the expression levels of transcription factor genes and signal transduction components are similar to those of metabolic genes. Examining the expression patterns of large gene families, we found that they are often more similar than would be expected by chance, indicating that many gene families have been co-opted for specific developmental processes.

The problem of active learning is approached in this paper by minimizing
directly an estimate of the expected test error. The main difficulty
in this ``optimal'' strategy is that output probabilities need to be
estimated accurately. We suggest here different methods
for estimating those efficiently.
In this context, the Parzen window classifier is considered
because it is both simple and probabilistic. The analysis of experimental
results highlights that regularization is a key ingredient for this strategy.

We believe that the cluster assumption is key
to successful semi-supervised learning.
Based on this, we propose three semi-supervised algorithms:
1. deriving graph-based distances that emphazise low density regions
between clusters, followed by training a standard SVM;
2. optimizing the Transductive SVM objective function,
which places the decision boundary in low density regions,
by gradient descent;
3. combining the first two to make
maximum use of the cluster assumption.
We compare with state of the art algorithms and demonstrate superior accuracy for the latter two methods.

In Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, pages: 112-119, (Editors: R Cowell, R and Z Ghahramani), AISTATS, January 2005 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We discuss reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS)-based measures of statistical dependence, with emphasis on constrained covariance (COCO), a novel criterion to test dependence of random variables. We show that COCO is a test for independence if and only if the associated RKHSs are universal. That said, no independence test exists that can distinguish dependent and independent random variables in all circumstances. Dependent random variables can result in a COCO which is arbitrarily close to zero when the source densities are highly non-smooth. All current kernel-based independence tests share this behaviour. We demonstrate exponential convergence between the population and empirical COCO. Finally, we use COCO as a measure of joint neural activity between voxels in MRI recordings of the macaque monkey, and compare the results to the mutual information and the correlation. We also show the effect of removing breathing artefacts from the MRI recording.

We investigate the problem of defining Hilbertian metrics resp.
positive definite kernels on probability measures, continuing previous work. This type of kernels has shown very good
results in text classification and has a wide range of possible
applications. In this paper we extend the two-parameter family of
Hilbertian metrics of Topsoe such that it now includes all
commonly used Hilbertian metrics on probability measures. This
allows us to do model selection among these metrics in an elegant
and unified way. Second we investigate further our approach to
incorporate similarity information of the probability space into
the kernel. The analysis provides a better understanding of these
kernels and gives in some cases a more efficient way to compute
them. Finally we compare all proposed kernels in two text and two
image classification problems.

This paper introduces a provably stable learning adaptive control framework with statistical learning. The proposed algorithm employs nonlinear function approximation with automatic growth of the learning network according to the nonlinearities and the working domain of the control system. The unknown function in the dynamical system is approximated by piecewise linear models using a nonparametric regression technique. Local models are allocated as necessary and their parameters are optimized on-line. Inspired by composite adaptive control methods, the proposed learning adaptive control algorithm uses both the tracking error and the estimation error to update the parameters. We first discuss statistical learning of nonlinear functions, and motivate our choice of the locally weighted learning framework. Second, we begin with a class of first order SISO systems for theoretical development of our learning adaptive control framework, and present a stability proof including a parameter projection method that is needed to avoid potential singularities during adaptation. Then, we generalize our adaptive controller to higher order SISO systems, and discuss further extension to MIMO problems. Finally, we evaluate our theoretical control framework in numerical simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed learning adaptive controller for rapid convergence and high accuracy of control.

If the training pattern set is large, it takes a large memory and a long time to train support vector machine (SVM). Recently, we proposed neighborhood property based pattern selection algorithm (NPPS) which selects only the patterns that are likely to be near the decision boundary ahead of SVM training [Proc. of the 7th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI 2637), Seoul, Korea, pp. 376387]. NPPS tries to identify those patterns that are likely to become support vectors in feature space. Preliminary reports show its effectiveness: SVM training time was reduced by two orders of magnitude with almost no loss in accuracy for various datasets. It has to be noted, however, that decision boundary of SVM and support vectors are all defined in feature space while NPPS described above operates in input space. If neighborhood relation in input space is not preserved in feature space, NPPS may not always be effective. In this paper, we sh
ow that the neighborhood relation is invariant under input to feature space mapping. The result assures that the patterns selected by NPPS in input space are likely to be located near decision boundary in feature space.

We present a new method to estimate the intrinsic dimensionality of a submanifold M in Euclidean space from random samples. The method is based on the
convergence rates of a certain U-statistic on the manifold. We solve at least partially the question of the choice of the scale of the data.
Moreover the proposed method is easy to implement, can handle large data sets and performs very well even for small sample sizes. We compare the
proposed method to two standard estimators on several artificial as well as real data sets.

In genomic sequence analysis tasks like splice site recognition or promoter identification, large amounts of training sequences are available, and indeed needed to achieve sufficiently high classification performances. In this work we study two recently proposed and successfully used kernels, namely the Spectrum kernel and the Weighted Degree kernel (WD). In particular, we suggest several extensions using Suffix Trees and modi cations of an SMO-like SVM training algorithm in order to accelerate the training of the SVMs and their evaluation on test sequences. Our simulations show that for the spectrum kernel and WD kernel, large scale SVM training can be accelerated by factors of 20 and 4 times, respectively, while using much less memory (e.g. no kernel caching). The evaluation on new sequences is often several thousand times faster using the new techniques (depending on the number of Support Vectors). Our method allows us to train on sets as large as one million sequences.

We develop a methodology for solving high dimensional dependency estimation problems between pairs of data types, which is viable in the case where the output of interest has very high dimension, e.g., thousands of dimensions. This is achieved by mapping the objects into continuous or discrete spaces, using joint kernels. Known correlations between input and output can be defined by such kernels, some of which can maintain linearity in the outputs to provide simple (closed form) pre-images. We provide examples of such kernels and empirical results.

While there is strong motivation for using Gaussian Processes (GPs) due to their excellent performance in regression and classification problems, their computational complexity makes them impractical when the size of the training set exceeds a few thousand cases. This has motivated the recent proliferation of a number of cost-effective approximations to GPs, both for classification and for regression. In this paper we analyze one popular approximation to GPs for regression: the reduced rank approximation. While generally GPs are equivalent to infinite linear models, we show that Reduced Rank Gaussian Processes (RRGPs) are equivalent to finite sparse linear models. We also introduce the concept of degenerate GPs and show that they correspond to inappropriate priors. We show how to modify the RRGP to prevent it from being degenerate at test time. Training RRGPs consists both in learning the covariance function hyperparameters and the support set. We propose a method for learning hyperparameters for a given support set. We also review the Sparse Greedy GP (SGGP) approximation (Smola and Bartlett, 2001), which is a way of learning the support set for given hyperparameters based on approximating the posterior. We propose an alternative method to the SGGP that has better generalization capabilities. Finally we make experiments to compare the different ways of training a RRGP. We provide some Matlab code for learning RRGPs.

The last few years have witnessed important new developments in the theory and practice
of pattern classification. We intend to survey some of the main new ideas that have lead to these
important recent developments.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems